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Comment by sgentle | Hacker News Reader

Competitive gaming is a particularly good example of this. I followed most of the rise of Dota from trashy Warcraft 3 mod to Valve's multi-million-dollar-prize-pool juggernaut.

The first few crops of Dota millionaires all had the same backstory: "I played this game 14 hours a day. If there were tournaments at all they didn't really pay anything. My parents said I was wasting my life. I never had a girlfriend. Everyone thought I was a loser, but I just wanted to play and win... and now I know it was all worth it."

And the thing that I couldn't help thinking is: was it? I'm not sure that any rational person would make that decision. Even if you could somehow know that competitive gaming would get big enough, and that your particular game would be popular enough, and that you could become good enough to win – that's just table stakes. You then have to actually play the game obsessively for a decade. There are, frankly, far more comfortable ways to earn a million dollars in exchange for 20,000 to 50,000 hours of your life.

It's kind of hard to take a coherent message away from that. Should you become a competitive gamer for the millions? Certainly not then, and definitely not now. Should you hope that your fringe interest (bus tickets, say) becomes a million-dollar enterprise? No, that's probably even less likely.

Perhaps the message is just that millions are delivered to those with a combination of luck and the freedom to pursue rationally unjustifiable interests. A combination that is increasingly rare in an economic system designed to squeeze out the inefficient. Lest we forget the Bell monopoly; we may never see such inefficiency again.

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It’s a confirmation bias.

I have a similar story. I dropped out of school at 16, and spent 14+ hours a day playing Stepmania Online, which was Dance Dance Revolution for your fingers. I was one of the best in the world! Then everyone stopped playing and nothing came of it. So for every DOTA millionaire or whatnot there’s likely thousands of people who are obsessed with something equally niche who haven’t realized any financial gains because of it.

Now I’m a software engineer, it’s working out way better than playing video games all day.

Ah, Stepmania Online...what a fun time that was. I remember putting in my 6-8 a day after school. I may not have been at the level you were at but I was roughly the same age and quite good. Then, I went to college and no longer had the same desire to play anymore.

Do you still crack open Stepmania every so often for old times sake? I have no idea if any kind of a community still exists around it.

Hah I haven’t for a couple years but last time I did I was amazed and dismayed at having the sensation that my mind knows what to do, but my fingers just aren’t quick enough. I’d guess if you were a musician or athlete who hadn’t played in awhile it’d feel similar. I end up shutting it off because my brain isn’t entertained by the slow songs and my hands can’t physically keep up with the fast ones that I loved so much, and it’d probably take me a few weeks to get any good again and I’m not willing to put in that kind of time with a family.

It also gave me a lesson in hierarchies of competence. Even though I was maybe one of the 20 best people ranked in Stepmania Online, there were people who despite the amount of time I’d put in were significantly better at the game. (The name Nima comes to mind, I think he was a concert pianist whose skills translated into perfect accuracy on Stepmania). Despite being really good, I felt like I’d never be the best.

It was also around that time that I met Day9, the pro Starcraft now relatively famous Twitch streamer at a LAN party and he introduced me to Beatmania, which was like Stepmania only more keys. He was so good at it (and arrogant, hah but isn’t any sixteen year old that can be?) that I sort of gave up on Stepmania because it felt like peanuts in comparison.

Yeah, I remember Nima, and I also remember a similar feeling upon discovering Beatmania. Now that I'm digging into the cobwebs of my memories, I am beginning to recall a game called O2Jam which was essentially a South Korean Beatmania flavored MMO. Very challenging, and it definitely usurped some of the space I was otherwise giving to Stepmania Online. Did you ever get into O2Jam? I think it might even still be around.

But doesn't your case support the hypothesis that it's interest and luck? You had the former but not the latter, of which the DOTA players did.

> Competitive gaming is a particularly good example of this.

Anything competitive is emphatically not a good example of this. If you're in a competition, then by definition you're doing the exact same thing as everyone else. That's a guaranteed recipe for not accomplishing anything meaningful in life.

Competition can be great for cultivating positive character traits and developing certain skills, but at some point you need to move beyond it.

The key ingredient in the obsession is that you're not seeking personal advantage. I wish there was a better word for this than pg's "disinterested" because it sounds strange to have an intense, all-consuming interest in which you're disinterested (see his footnote about choosing this word).

Because you're not pursuing personal advantage, this kind of obsession is incompatible with competition. You're obsessively interested in collecting old bus tickets not because you want to get paid, not because you want to be famous, not because you want to change the world, and not because you want to win.

So it's a bit weird for pg to identify "heuristics you can use to guess whether an obsession might be one that matters". If you care about whether a thing matters, instead about the thing itself, then you're not really disinterested.

As soon as your obsession becomes influenced by thoughts of personal advantage, then it's about garden variety ambition and determination, not the magical property of disinterest that pg describes.

Disinterested obsession may be a powerful source of innovation and progress, but the instant you intentionally try to harness this power in pursuit of progress, you destroy the magic of disinterest.

> I wish there was a better word for this than pg's "disinterested" because it sounds strange to have an intense, all-consuming interest in which you're disinterested.

It's interest in the sense of "conflict of interest", not in the sense of finding something fascinating.

Perhaps a word that connotes neutrality like “impartial” would be better in this context?

I'd almost say "introversion" or "selfishness" is the right term, if the latter weren't so prejudicial. You aren't collecting bus tickets or obsessing over infinite series to advance your own material interests or standing in the external world.

"Disinterest" doesn't work at all in any sense of the term. In the absence of overt mental illness, the bus-ticket collector must see it as being in his best interest to spend his time collecting bus tickets, or he'd do something else instead. ("You are your calendar.") The search for gratification, however externally meaningless, is certainly a valid expression of self-interest.

Put another way, if you would object if you were forcibly stopped from pursuing a goal, then you cannot be described as "disinterested."

> I wish there was a better word for this than pg's "disinterested"

"Intrinsic motivation", perhaps?

Yeah, I'm not a fan of the word "disinterested" either. "dis-self-interested" might be more accurate, but also not good.

Maybe "impersonal"? Still weirdly contradictory but closer to the meaning maybe.

"detached" or "impartial"?

The limitations of English are weird.

Did you see PG's footnote?

[2] I worried a little about using the word "disinterested," since some people mistakenly believe it means not interested. But anyone who expects to be a genius will have to know the meaning of such a basic word, so I figure they may as well start now.

From dictionary.com, the second definition of disinterested is "having no interest in something," but the first is, "not influenced by considerations of personal advantage."

You're eliminating a big category of things most people recognize as genius here. There's a long history of recognized genius in the development of chess and go over time for instance. You may not consider this as meaningful as breakthroughs in physics and biology for instance (and I may agree), but I think it leaves out a pretty big part of our history to discount this altogether.

Interesting perspective!

I guess the rebuttal might go something like: Business is inherently competitive. Creating startups, you are usually competing not only with old line businesses but with other startups.

I guess the rebuttal to the rebuttal might sound something like Thiel's startup lectures: Startups should try to be anticompetitive, ideally carving out new niches. You don't want to engage in head-to-head competition.

The 3rd degree rebuttal might be something like: There are plenty of examples of successful startups that began as clones of other businesses (Facebook seems the canonical example).

But then as you say, they moved beyond being a clone of Friendster/Myspace/Tribe/etc... but isn't that the competitive process?

Competitive gaming was an extreme niche 20 years ago. Now its just a niche with lots of people. When these people started, the concept of competitive gaming didnt even really exist.

It might just be a matter of framing, but I do not understand: How could you ever do anything work related, void of competition for any significant stretch of time?

Even if you create or exploit something wildly new that is completely beyond reach for anyone else at that moment – let's say you made time travel viable tomorrow – as soon as you did and started commercialising it, competition would start forming later that day.

For everything else, you will right off the gate be competing with someone over something (at the very least time and money). Airbnb is competing with Hotels/Motels, Uber with Taxis, Facebook with MySpace. MySpace with more specialised communities and GeoCities. The internet was competing with telephones, mail, fax and the yellow pages.

Can you elaborate?

What in life is not a competition?

What the above comment is about applies to so much in life, from education to careers because at their core, they are competitions.

> If you're in a competition, the. By definition you're doing the exact same thing as everyone else.

Not true.

There are people who play competitive, ranked, games 3 hrs a week and are happy with being in the top 50% of players

And there are people who spend 30hrs a week in a game and are profoundly unhappy they're only in the top 5% of players.

Those wind up being two very different paths, and it applies to way more than just gaming, like education, which I can speak from experience to that

From a young age I would spend hours upon hours on computers working on my games and random ideas. Even in school I would skip classes to work on my own projects in a computer lab.

My parents felt it was a complete waste of time (especially since it became a huge drain on my performance at school). I didn't have nearly as many close friends as I should have, didn't form a lot of the bonds people growing up do, it ruined my relationship with my parents.

At the end of the day through luck or something I scraped through high school with a .1 above failing GPA, dropped out of community college after failing 2 semesters and started a career in tech by freelancing.

Now 5 years later and the positions I've taken are consistently higher seniority than my friends who did CS in college, so it worked out, but at what cost?

Those years I lost, not even talking to one of my parents for over a year despite living in the same house, wasn't really worth it.

But it was an obsession, I didn't obsess over programming because I wanted to have a great career one day, it was because I couldn't help it. It was almost like an addiction that I got lucky enough to have double as a marketable skill.

It's crazy how much article really resonates with my experience, almost annoyingly so since I feel like a bus ticket collector sometimes, sure tech is a marketable skill, but you sure build a lot of unimportant stuff

> What in life is not a competition?

The examples given in the post are not competitions.

The bus ticket collector is interested in old bus tickets, and is not competing with anybody.

Ramanujan obsessed over series, and was not competing with anybody.

Flipping light switches is not a competition... I wasn't being literal. I mean a great number of important things in life are competitions even if we don't see ourselves as competitors. -

But actually I disagree with saying Ramanujan wasn't competing with anyone, he just wasn't trying to compete

Plenty of people would consider any academic field a competition, even if not everyone in the field is there to compete

The competitive nature of the mathematics field easily have to do with why Ramanujan was not taken as seriously as he should have been at first. A "competitor" was coming with claims to grand contributions and that already created friction, which when combined with other factors about his non-traditional presentation became roadblocks.

> If you're in a competition, then by definition you're doing the exact same thing as everyone else. That's a guaranteed recipe for not accomplishing anything meaningful in life.

That's a mistaken conclusion because you didn't follow it properly to the narrowed end: if you're in a large field of competition at a thing and you're among the best in the world at it, then the exact opposite is more likely to be true (you will likely do something meaningful and have extreme success) and your supposed guaranteed recipe collapses.

This premise holds true in eg: business, acting, music, science, traditional sports, games like chess, and numerous other fields.

Right now, around the world, dozens (or hundreds) of scientists are competing to reach the same breakthrough. They may not know who all the competitors are and may not know they're all chasing the same thing, but they are. One or a small group of them will get there before the rest. It is competition and it doesn't exclude you from doing something meaningful: you need to win the competition.

See: Tom Hanks, Meryl Streep, Michael Jordan, Serena Williams, Kurt Cobain, Whitney Houston, Craig Venter, Garry Kasparov, John Carmack, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos

All had to rise to the top of highly competitive fields with a large supply of competitors. How many other grunge bands were there next to Nirvana? How many other singers did Whitney Houston have to stand apart from? How many other women (frequently younger, a big deal in tennis) has Serena Williams had to competitively outlast over ~20 years to spend so much time on top of her sport and put together one of the greatest sports careers of all-time? It's a never ending supply of younger, highly talented competitors, and yet Williams did what she did.

Trying to prove the Riemann hypothesis is doing the same thing like everyone else. Competition might actually force you to come up with a different approach.

Society deify successful people when in reality they are nothing more than serial lottery winners. For every "Ronaldo" there are a myriad of people trying to get there that will end their life as losers because they made an high-stakes bet and lost. The truth in unconfortable and nobody wants to listen about it.

>> Society deify successful people when in reality they are nothing more than serial lottery winners

This is absolutely false and a terrible thing to perpetuate. Work ethic has the highest controllable coefficient to success as an output. Luck exists and the universe is probabilistic, yes, but it is not non-deterministic.

This self-lashing of our community and amongst the populist movement that is growing in popularity in the EU and US is ridiculous, reducing the sum total of human achievement into lucky chance rather than actually understanding the probabilistic universe and knowing that while our actions do not wholly determine our fate, they play the single largest role we have control over, and as such, it would be better to believe the myth that we have full control over our destiny rather than this ridiculous concept that luck controls ~100% of circumstance.

Probability theory needs to be taught in primary school, apparently, because for members of even this community, the fallacy of determinism and binary outcomes run rampant.

>> it would be better to believe the myth that we have full control over our destiny rather than this ridiculous concept that luck controls ~100% of circumstance.

Why think in black and white ?

We have a lot impact on our lives, but there's also some luck involved, especially if we want to achieve extreme things.

> reducing the sum total of human achievement into lucky chance

Not the sum total of achievement, just a single individual's achievement. An individual's achievement can indeed be attributed ~100% to luck. For every Einstein there are hundreds of equally brilliant geniuses who died picking cotton in a field.

I believe genetics is more important than work ethic for being a pro soccer player.

You need both. To be the top one percent of what you do, you need natural ability and dedication.

You absolutely do, but I think there are a lot more people who have dedication than have talent.

This is why having a social safety net is so important. If society can put a floor under how badly people can lose, they'll feel more free to try low-probability high-payoff endeavors.

This is possibly the greatest argument for social safety nets ever made, really.

The economy of today is so efficient and supply chains are so effective at moving things to people who need them, that it seems incredibly stupid to not use it to provide some kind of basic necessities to every human being, no questions asked.

If the US were to do this today, there would be more innovation, less misery, a supercharged economy as you've increased the purchasing power of millions of people overnight...It a fucking no brainer. And cutting taxes rather than providing more benefits seems like the most stupid way to run a country I've ever seen in my life.

So if you spend 14 hours a day for 5 years on a computer project that becomes useful, and a lot of people want it and pay you for it, you are willing to fork over most of that to the government since they provided you with the basic allowance that let you pursue this project, and your success is how they fund a basic allowance for everyone - you included.

While your friend, who did nothing for 5 years, maintains the same standard of living that you do.

I guess this could work, but to me, the level of "disinterest" required to be okay with this result is even more rare than genius.

Nobody on the planet has ever gone "oh fuck me I only made 300 million with my extremely successful business instead of 600 million. Well what a waste of time, I shouldn't have ever started it."

No rational person that isn't already well off would take a 1% shot at 1 billion over a 10% shot at 100 million.

Progressive taxation and social safety don't stifle economies, they make them thrive. They act as a negative tax on risk, and create a framework where actors are free to pursue higher EV bets without worrying as much about utility value. Literally the entire point is to create more pie for everyone.

Bludgers getting "free money" is just a side effect. You're not paying for them with your taxes, you're paying into an insurance fund with all the other innovators. Except this fund is +EV, subsidized by all the other countries in the global economy that aren't taking the same gains. You're the one getting the free money, and the leaners are taxing some percentage of that.

The only reason every successful country in the world isn't already doing it is because of this unintuitive "common sense" optic that you (and about a billion others, literally) are propagating: that somehow it breaks the rules of "fairness". The reality is it's got absolutely nothing to do with fairness, it's about maximizing the bottom line, just like in business. Governments don't give a shit about individual people, nor should they (at least not at the expense of society).

Also, I'd guess most first world countries could easily (and do) provide a world class social safety net without going over 50% taxation in any bracket, not even billionaires. Your example only applies if you're talking about taxation in the 70-100% range.

> While your friend, who did nothing for 5 years, maintains the same standard of living that you do.

Honestly, is this such a bad thing? Why do we incentivize innovation by promising people a basic standard of living? We reward people who take risks with something better than that anyways, so I see no problem with giving people not willing to take those risks something lesser than that “for free”.

> For every "Ronaldo" there are a myriad of people trying to get there that will end their life as losers because they made an high-stakes bet and lost.

For every "Ronaldo" there are a small amount of moderately successful players playing soccer for a good living.

The myriad is the group of people that are coasting their way through life trying to put in as little effort as possible and naturally they don't succeed.

To be fair, Ronaldo is known for exceptional work ethic.

That's kinda the point. Work ethic and obsession are not enough: you have to also win a series of lotteries -- genetic and environmental -- to succeed in his field.

> That's kinda the point. Work ethic and obsession are not enough: you have to also win a series of lotteries -- genetic and environmental -- to succeed in his field.

Ok, you've heard of Cristiano Ronaldo. Yet, have you heard of Dani?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dani_(footballer,_born_1976)

Like Ronaldo he was launched int Sporting Clube de Portugal's first team when he played for the club's U17 team. Unlike Ronaldo, Dani didn't had a heart condition. Unlike Ronaldo, Dani had more appearances in his first year in the first team, and was quickly picked by WestHam and Ajax.

Unlike Ronaldo, Dani had a notoriously poor work ethics. Unlike Ronaldo, Dani's impressive start was squandered and he went nowhere, he achieved nothing and has since been forgotten.

Work ethics is the deciding factor. You may have won the genetic lottery and be a bonafide ubermensch but if your work ethics suck then you'll quickly be surpassed by those lesser talented but more hard working than you.

I mostly agree with you but "work ethics" is also partially genetic. It's defined partly by a big five trait called conscientiousness which has a fair percentage of its effects not explainable by the environment or random chance.

Yes, but work ethic and obsession are the absolute baseline you need.

Most professional athletes aren’t obsessive just because they have a weirdly specific passion for their sport. They’re obsessive because they’re pathologically competitive. There’s stories about eg Michael Jordan buying a ping pong table and obsessively practicing at ping pong because he had a teammate who beat him at ping pong once and he wasn’t able to let it go until he beat the guy in a rematch. Obsession can come from many sources.

I think even that point is debatable depending on how you define success.

If the definition of success is wealth or notoriety, there are certainly people who achieve it without those traits.

The fact that people become successful and/or notorious due to luck does not invalidate the fact that work ethic and your efforts play the largest controllable role you have. To focus on pure chance outcomes is unproductive and nonsensical.

Those do help.

Have you given thought to whether these are the absolute baseline...or actually the consequences of practices more fundamental?

I find it sad and disturbing that so many people worship being a workaholic.

People worship success. Turns out to be better than other hard working people you need to work extremely hard.

Success (by which most people mean financial success, fame, or winning in some competition) is certainly worshipped.

However, just being "a hard worker" in itself is considered a virtue by many people.

I hesitate to call it the Protestant Work Ethic or the Puritan Work Ethic, as it's far from limited to Protestants or Puritans, but that's really what it is. The harder you work, the more virtuous you are considered to be, and working less is considered sinful or lazy (in other words, unvirtuous and blame-worthy).

Being better than other hard working people can also involve simply kicking the ladder from underneath you, playing the social status game or making bets at the edge of the law and shoving that risk onto other people.

And sometimes no matter how hard you work, you're one of those people under the rungs.

Most top athletes have excellent work ethic but they also have natural ability. No amount of work ethic can compensate for lack of natural ability. You absolutely need that to get to the top.

I think pg is trying to argue that passionate disinterest is different from work ethic. For a person like Ronaldo, all of the off-field training might be enjoyable. If it is, then is it really work ethic? Or is it just Ronaldo doing what he wants to do and would be doing anyway, if there were no such thing as money?

Maybe the serial lottery winning is what society subconscious worships.. they know that even with insane amounts of dedications, the others failed when a few particular ones got "lucky".

That reminds me of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCsPz0GYGJM "What streaming on Twitch has done to my life" - I remember crying while watching, it's heartbreaking.

You could take this argument all the way down. Why did valve pick it up? I don't think they saw dota2 as a profit engine necessarily, though there is some argument for that. The company does tend to engage in bus ticket obsessions (VR, dota2). Sometimes it fails (artifact). But I strongly suspect that Gabe Newell bus tickets dota2. I would guess that like myself, he has no real skill at the game, but he just loves it. And he hired the guy (icefrog) that bus tickets dota2 mechanics. The combination is an enormously entertaining (for us fans) wildly unlikely tournament that has a 30 million dollar purse.

Tarn and Zach Adams are also bus ticketers.

When valve picked up dota, league of legends was the most played multiplayer pc game in the world. I think it’s more likely that valve was afraid of exodus of pc gamers from their platform.

A bit of both. A group of people in Valve did become fascinated by Dota, though IIRC the leading figure was Robin Walker (of Team Fortress and Team Fortress 2 fame). That's why TF2 started sprouting MOBA-influenced weapons, for instance. But at the same time the business case for adopting Dota must have been quite clear, and surely was discussed seriously. (Valve also had plenty of experience in successfully bringing other people's existing games or mods in-house: TF and CS, Portal and Left 4 Dead.) Meanwhile Blizzard apparently continued to refuse all offers from the Dota developers.

> "pursue rationally unjustifiable interests"

I disagree of how you define rationality here. If someone feels it serves them fine to play 14 hours of a game, it seems perfectly rational for me. Especially in the case that you mentioned, where they were playing before any big money was on the table. It means they liked, despite a lot of people judging them with an air of superiority.

If you work 8 hours a day and sleep 8 hours a day play a video games 14 hours a day, well the math doesn't work to being rational for an adult

It is objectively irrational. The ones who made a lot of money are 1%. The rest wasted their youth pursuing an impossible dream. They sacrificed their social development and their future job prospects.

No it is not. If someone is playing 14 hours of a game that is not even giving a lot of money (not even to any 1%, which is the initial situation mentioned before DOTA was big), then obviously they are not doing that for the money.

You'd be suprised. It's not uncommon to see players that only play that much because they want to become a pro player, but in the end they never make it, or qualify to 1-2 tournaments. The lucky ones end up making money from streaming, but a lot depend on their parents or girlfriend's for a place to live since they don't make enough money to live off of.

I think we are talking about two very different things. I am talking about bus ticket collectors and you are talking about gamers playing pro games giving millions of dollars in prizes.

edit: I re-read my previous comment and I am not sure I could make it more clear.

if a game does not gives money prizes at all, the ones who are playing it are not playing for the money.

Chance favors the prepared mind I guess

They played the game they loved and they loved to win at it

When money arrived into e-games they were most prepared

I don’t like competitive gaming so even if you tell me there are millions to be made I still won’t do it, it seems something so unattainable

> Perhaps the message is just that millions are delivered to those with a combination of luck and the freedom to pursue rationally unjustifiable interests.

Where do you see that message? No luck was involved in your example, just hard work on behalf of the good players and of the Dota developers, and pursuing a hobby with passion is perfectly rational.

The luck comes in that they opted to play Dota at just the right time. If someone had instead opted into becoming a really good Heroes of the Storm player (only to have the developer stop work on it) they would be in a really different position.

> ...pursuing a hobby with passion is perfectly rational.

To a point, yes. Though we may disagree on the threshold where it crosses over from rational to unhealthy obsession. And there is certainly luck involved when there are tens who found fortune out of millions participating.

In my interpretation of the reply, they were "lucky" in that the field took off and became economically viable to be good at it.

Frankly, back 20 years ago I would have never thought that watching someone play a game would become a form of entertainment.

> never thought that watching someone play a game would become a form of entertainment.

Then what the hell are NFL, NBA, etc? People have been watching others play a game as a form of entertainment for as long as society can remember:

> Frankly, back 20 years ago I would have never thought that watching someone play a game would become a form of entertainment.

Even after popular chess matches on TV in the 80's, 90's?

The luck is that that game turned out to be lucrative.

Which highly competitive endeavours, that millions of young people spend many hours per week on, aren't?

Tons of other games didn't become big esports, and most of the people who dedicated years to those games ended up wasting their time.

> ended up wasting their time.

So, did they play these games in the hope to make millions, or because they liked them?

> There are, frankly, far more comfortable ways to earn a million dollars in exchange for 20,000 to 50,000 hours of your life.

Not everything is about ROI, I'm also not saying playing Dota for your entire life is going to be particularly fulfilling in many other ways thought - after all they are playing out their lives within the very finite confines of someone else's creation.

The author does point this out as a suggested heuristic, if you are obsessed with someone elses creation, it's probably not going to be very fruitful (whether fruitful means money, scientific discovery, or fulfillment ones curiosity etc).

>It's kind of hard to take a coherent message away from that. Should you become a competitive gamer for the millions?

If you told these guys to be a competitive gamer for the millions, they probably would have stuck to competitive fishing or whatever they were doing anyway. Taking a message or leadership from it is kind of the antithesis of the point. The point is that some social pursuits are the birthplace of the next big thing and some people who are focused on socializing need to make the choice on pursuits that have a potential and pursuits that don't like. Dance class is pretty dead as a career, but we're going to need people who can sort quality from quantity in a few years, the people focused on a qualitative pursuit socially need to pick a field where it's obvious that's needed like journalism or the swath of video games sure to flood the market.

It doesn't have much to do with rational decision making in detail and is instead a generalized story about the different directions in life you can choose.

> Competitive gaming is a particularly good example of this

>> it's more promising if you're creating something, rather than just consuming something someone else creates

Gaming consumes the creative efforts of others. It's fun, invigorating and a healthy pass-time. But it's not good ground for growing genius.

>And the thing that I couldn't help thinking is: was it? I'm not sure that any rational person would make that decision.

You have to weigh your current abilities and their earning potential vs. the costs of venturing into a new field.

Being at the top of Dota is easier than being at the top of Math or Chess or Go, since Dota is a newer field. They aren't really comparable, but you still compare them if you are trying to figure out what you want to put your time into.

Some people just get lucky and find the thing they are good at on the first try. Then they can maximize their hours available for that thing.

Other people (probably the majority) have to try different fields and start later, and ultimately have less time overall to spend.

So it actually seems rational (if maximizing hours-spent is your goal) to go all-in on the first thing that grabs your interest, which could be Dota.

> Being at the top of Dota is easier than being at the top of Math or Chess or Go

I slightly disagree - neither Chess nor Go have nearly the millions of new players playing it obsessively as they come of age. Math is a bit different, but often times “good at math” isn’t very rewarding except as it pertains to an ancillary job, or if you’re one of the relative few who become a math major.

There’s also a major drop off over time with MOBA players - the average age is 22 or something for professionals. Eventually the reflexes get worse.

I'm going to have to disagree with you there. Being a top chess or go player in modern times necessitates being a child prodigy. The skill gap in chess and go is enormous. I don't think the number of players is the primary indicator of how difficult it is to be at the "top" of an activity.

> combination that is increasingly rare in an economic system designed to squeeze out the inefficient

As a result, more and more areas of science and technology get stuck near local maxima. The same happened in all ancient civilisations.

Does being good at Dota count as being a genius?

I think you are confusing financial success with contributing to artistic/scientific/intellectual progress.

Don't get hung up on the term genius, focus on the chance discovery part that is the actual topic of the article. Those first wave gaming professionals discovered a personal product market fit without trying, by being obsessed with an absurdly unprofitable pastime.

The article title contains the word ‘genius’ and it’s about doing ‘great work’. The fact that some people managed to turn their consumption-based entertainment hobby into a financial success really has nothing to do with genius or great work.

Yeah, for reference, even mid-level people at FAANG in basically any field can make $1M in 2-3 years. I think most people have no idea how much some laborers can make in the US.

Contrary to popular belief, you don't have to be a genius to work in FAANG. It's a lot of luck. You just have to give yourself as many good chances in the interview pipeline as possible.

> Perhaps the message is just that millions are delivered to those with a combination of luck and the freedom to pursue rationally unjustifiable interests

Nah, millions are delivered to those who already have millions, everything else is noise that is overemphasized to distract the bottom 80+%.

It might be worthwhile to remind ourselves here that making lots of money, acquiring status, and gaining power are obsessive interests that some people have.

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